Deadlock

For more than a year, most of New York City's 242,500 high-school students had gone without outside athletics, school papers or senior proms. Their teachers, holding out for a pay raise, refused to supervise any extracurricular activities. Last week, in an attempt to end the deadlock, the city's Board of Education passed the buck to its high-school principals. Armed with a ruling from the State Education Department, it adopted a new regulation which ordered principals to assign "reasonable amounts [of work] outside of regular classroom instruction," and threatened recalcitrant teachers with charges of insubordination and possible dismissal.

As a sop to the low-paid teachers (salary range: $2,650 to $5,650), the board approved $400-a-year raises. But the gesture was quickly hooted down. While 500 angry teachers demonstrated outside school headquarters at no Livingston Street, Brooklyn, nearly 200 who had jammed into the meeting room answered the board's action with angry speeches and boos of derision. Frankly skeptical of a promise to continue fighting for the salary scale ($3,000 to $6,500) recommended by a city fact-finding commission, the teachers defiantly announced that they would continue their boycott: "Thirty-five thousand teachers cannot be charged with neglect of duty or insubordination."

This week the deadlock seemed as far from solution as ever. The N.Y. Teachers' Guild asked the State Supreme Court for a temporary injunction against the new after-class work rule, and in at least one high school, restive students themselves resolved to boycott extracurricular activities if teachers are forced to conduct them.

In Pawtucket, R.I., the A.F. of L. Teachers' Alliance (to which all but 58 of the city's 520 teachers belong) was out on strike for the second week, demanding a $410 cost-of-living salary boost. With their classrooms technically open (in order to qualify for state financial aid), some students were dutifully checking in at the usual time in the morning, milling around for a bit, and then resuming their unexpected holiday.

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